Fidelity tells sub-$100 million RIA clients to reach $100 million or leave by mid-2027

Fidelity Investments has told existing RIA custody clients below $100 million in assets that they have until June 30, 2027, to reach that threshold or begin moving off the platform, a change the custodian confirmed after an advisor posted the notice on LinkedIn. Fidelity had already applied the $100 million floor to new advisory firms, and extending it to incumbents is, the company says, about consistency, though the margin economics point the same way: accounts below that size often produce too little revenue to cover the custody and service costs they consume.

Advisors including Michael Kitces and Alex Chalekian argue the small-firm exit will eventually cost Fidelity business, because some of those firms would have grown into larger accounts, but the change gives every sub-scale relationship a deadline: grow, switch custodians, or sell before June 30, 2027. A forced choice on a known date is what feeds an M&A pipeline.

That pipeline was already visible overnight, when Concurrent announced its first RIA platform purchase with the acquisition of Spire Investment Partners, adding more than 30 advisor teams and about $5.4 billion in assets to lift Concurrent's total to $28.6 billion, with no purchase price disclosed. HB Wealth closed on the $700 million Austin RIA Wealth Care, entering Texas as its seventh market and adding a two-generation team that serves physicians; terms were not disclosed. The Podnos team—three advisors, Rachel Podnos O'Leary and Lauren Podnos-Garner based in Austin full time and Steven Podnos splitting his time between Texas and Florida—is exactly the kind of practice a platform can absorb in one transaction.

Beyond the platform deals, the recruiting traffic ran in the same direction: Rockefeller recruited Piedmont Wealth Partners, a $1 billion Truist team in Charlotte led by two managing directors whose careers began inside bank-owned brokerages; a seven-person UBS team with $1.3 billion in assets, Cullman/Holt Group, joined Wells Fargo FiNet in Ohio through Ascend Advisory Group; and Morgan Stanley advisor Dana Cornell, who oversaw $1 billion, joined Uniting Wealth Partners in Olean, New York. In each case, advisors moved from a bank or wirehouse to an independent or aggregator-backed structure, the same direction the small-RIA custody decision points.

For sub-$100 million RIAs, the practical choice is between challenger custodians and a platform sale that can roll the practice into an existing custody arrangement and take operational work off the table. The June 2027 date makes that sale conversation more concrete: instead of weighing a theoretical succession plan, the owner can weigh a known deadline, and if the firm cannot grow organically to $100 million, the platform acquirer becomes the most immediate exit.

Concurrent's purchase of Spire suggests the aggregator is now willing to buy its first platform rather than building one from scratch, and HB Wealth's Texas entry through a physician-focused practice shows the same playbook—buy a small firm with a niche client base and use it as a beachhead. Neither deal disclosed terms, but the positioning is aimed at the exact pool of firms the Fidelity minimum will flush out.

Elsewhere overnight, Partners Group split its €6.6 billion Global Value SICAV evergreen fund into two portfolios following a redemption cap earlier this year; how the assets or liquidity terms divide was not disclosed, but the restructuring is a separate reminder that semi-liquid private vehicles are still being redrawn as wealth channel flows mature. It lands in the same week as the Fidelity change, reinforcing the sense that the structures serving private wealth are being repriced at both the custody and the fund level.

The first wave will be firms that already know they cannot reach $100 million organically. They now have a date, and they have already seen the buyers: Concurrent and HB Wealth are in the market.